" The achievements and legacy of the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings The Imperative of Development highlights the research and policy analysis produced by the Wolfensohn Center for Development at Brookings. The Center, which operated from 2006 to 2011, was the first home at Brookings for research on international development. It sought to help identify effective solutions to key development challenges in order to create a more prosperous and stable world. Founded by James and Elaine Wolfensohn, the Center’s mission was to “to create knowledge that leads to action with real, scaled-up, and lasting development impact.” This volume reviews the Center’s achievements and lasting legacy, combining highlights of its most important research with new essays that examine the context and impact of that research. Six primary research streams of the Wolfensohn Center’s work are highlighted in The Imperative of Development: the shifting structure of the world economy in the twenty-first century; the challenge of scaling up the impact of development interventions; the effectiveness of development assistance; how to promote economic and social inclusion for Middle Eastern youth; the case for investing in early child development; and the need for global governance reform. In each chapter, a scholar associated with the particular research topic provides an overview of the issue and its broader context, then describes the Center’s work on the topic and the subsequent influence and impact of these efforts. The Imperative of Development chronicles the growth and expansion of the first center for development research in Brookings’s 100-year history and traces how the seeds of this initiative continue to bear fruit. "

As South Africa transitioned from apartheid to democracy, changes in the political landscape, as well as educational agendas and discourse on both a national and international level, shaped successive waves of curriculum reform over a relatively short period of time. Using South Africa as a germane example of how curriculum and pedagogy can interact and affect educational outcomes, Pedagogy in Poverty explores the potential of curricula to improve education in developing and emerging economies worldwide, and, ultimately, to reduce inequality. Incorporating detailed, empirical accounts of life inside South African classrooms, this book is a much-needed contribution to international debate surrounding optimal curriculum and pedagogic forms for children in poor schools. Classroom-level responses to curriculum policy reforms reveal some implications of the shifts between a radical, progressive approach and traditional curriculum forms. Hoadley focuses on the crucial role of teachers as mediators between curriculum and pedagogy, and explores key issues related to teacher knowledge by examining the teaching of reading and numeracy at the foundational levels of schooling. Offering a data-rich historical sociology of curriculum and pedagogic change, this book will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology of education, curriculum studies, educational equality and school reform, and the policy and politics of education.